In Boston last April, Elva Dryer set out to make the Olympic marathon team. Dryer ran the 5,000m for the United States at the Sydney games in 2000 and the 10,000m in Athens in 2004, and a third Olympic team in the marathon would have lent a graceful bookend to her career. She began as a middle-distance runner at Western State College in Colorado, where she won seven national titles, and has progressed steadily upward in distance over the years. "I think she thought, what a great cap to her career," her agent, Tom Ratcliffe, told me, "and certainly she was one of the strong favorites to make the team." But Dryer dropped out after 18 miles, and Deena Kastor, Magdalena Lewy Boulet and Blake Russell went to Beijing. In retrospect, Dryer remembers feeling congested the week leading up to the race, but had no real indication that things would go so poorly. "I expected fully to just line up and give it my best shot at making the team, and I felt I had a shot," Dryer told me in March. "I shed a few tears over that one. It was probably the hardest one to get over. But, you know. You have to move on."

On April 20, Dryer, now 37, will line up in Boston once more, this time for the 113th edition of the city's grand marathon. As usual, she is flying well under the radar. With Ryan Hall and Kara Goucher both aiming to break a quarter-century-long winless streak for Americans there, it’s unlikely that Dryer will receive much press, even if she runs very well, which she may. Since 2000, only seven American women have run under 2:30 in the marathon. (One of those seven, Deeja Youngquist, was later caught using EPO.) Dryer ran 2:31:48 on a blustery Chicago day in her 2006 debut for the distance, and there's a reasonable chance that she'll break 2:30 on April 20 and join that list. If she does, it will be an historically good race, and would solidify her place as one of the great American distance runners of the last 10 years.

But the news will still be Kara Goucher, and not wrongly. Fans want to see an American winner at America's favorite marathon, and Goucher has a shot. So Goucher will run well, or she won't, and that will be the story to come out of Boston. "I guess it's a bit personal for me now," Dryer said earlier this week. "Nobody expects me to set the world on fire at this point. I'm 37. I don't think anyone will be surprised one way or the other. I don't think anyone is paying attention." I said it sounded like she wanted to run even if it meant doing so in total anonymity. "That's it," she said. "Whether anybody notices or not—I don't think that's what I'll take away from this. I just want to go out, do my thing, and see what happens."

After her race at the Olympic marathon trials last spring, Dryer had little choice but to make a last-ditch effort and prepare for the 10,000m in Eugene, her final chance at qualifying for Beijing. But either the disappointment of the marathon trials was too strong, or her body hadn't recovered from her marathon preparation, which Dryer, Ratcliffe, and her coach and husband, Russ, now believe crossed that magical line from fitness to overtraining; she finished 15th.

Then she decided to run the American road race circuit over the summer and fall, but her results didn't register any measurable improvement from the Olympic trials slump. She finished 9th at Falmouth, barely top 10 at the U.S. 8K and 10K championships, and second at the 20K championships against a watered-down field. "I was still getting through my training," she told me, "but I didn't have that extra bit to race, obviously. My racing—I was feeling awful. It just felt awful, and so finally after the last road race I was just like, you know what, I'm not running, and that's when I was even like, 'If I ever run again.' So I had one of those patches."

One of the charming things about Dryer is that it’s possible to hear her smile when she speaks on the phone, but there’s often an incongruity between what she says—which is sometimes tinged with melancholy—and how she says it, because she is sincerely cheerful and self-effacing. After my conversations with her I came away feeling that, if the gaiety in her voice was there to mask discomfort, it was for my sake, not hers. It’s an uncommon manner of speaking, and it wasn't until I began to transcribe the interviews that I quite apprehended what she was telling me.

“One of those patches” meant the weeks following her decision to cut her racing season short and stop training altogether. Dryer ended up taking a month completely off, and for a period it was unclear whether the time off might continue indefinitely. "I was waffling between—what do I do? I still had some goals in the marathon, but it's not an easy business to make a living at, and I've done a lot that—I maybe could have walked away from it, but I didn't want to, quite yet—where I was just torn at that period."

The situation was complicated by Dryer’s and Ratcliffe's assumption that Nike, her sponsor of 12 years, wouldn’t renew her contract at the end of 2008, which proved correct. Dryer had three logical strikes against her from a sponsor's perspective: First, shoe companies generally pare their paid athletes at the end of Olympic years; second, the slumping retail economy meant that those companies had less money on hand than in a normal post-Olympic season; and third, she had run poorly throughout 2008.

But for the first time all year, Dryer caught a break. In early December, Ratcliffe was contacted by Matt Downin, a former Footlocker cross country champion and 10,000m specialist who had begun working for a networking company called Strands several weeks earlier. Downin was recruiting distance runners to run for a Strands-sponsored team and wanted to know if Dryer would be interested in joining. For Dryer and Ratcliffe, it was an easy offer to accept.

Strands is sort of like a monetized social networking company. Loosely, the organization tries to connect people through "social-recommender" computer software developed by a Spanish programmer named Francisco Martin in 2004. There are business and personal finance arms of the company, and a section that they describe as an "end-user oriented lifestreaming tool" that they hope will target and connect fitness- and sports-oriented people through their site. As a way to promote the venture, they hired Downin to recruit 15 professional runners, who now sport Strands-branded gear supplied by Puma. "It's very hard to find someone who doesn't really think Elva's a great person," Downin said, "so I thought she was a great fit for what we were trying to do."

It's always dicey playing the “What if?” game, but it's not entirely clear that Dryer would have continued running if Strands hadn't come along. She was prepared to accept retirement, though, and has described the interval between sponsors and the uncertainty about her future as a period of relative equanimity. Still, if she had decided to continue without sponsorship, it would have meant getting a job and losing some degree of focus on her training. But it's hard to say what might have happened, and Dryer hasn't spent much time wondering. "Maybe I would have won the lottery," she laughed. "Then I would have trained even better. I would have had all the money—maybe I could have gotten an Alter-G. I'd be a new woman."

The point here is that Dryer would have made the best of whatever happened, but there's little question she's happy to be back in the game, and ultimately what has made Dryer successful is what's keeping her around: she's extraordinarily competitive, internally, and feels she has unfinished business as a marathoner, a sentiment echoed by Russ, her husband and coach. "I think...she still believes in herself as an athlete," he wrote to me last month, "and she is competitive by nature."

Mastering the Marathon

The feeling of unfinished business goes beyond Dryer's disappointment at the Olympic trials marathon. After she ran her PR in 2006, she had every reason to believe that a faster marathon was hers in only a matter of time. Dryer's training before that race had been rushed, and it was so cold and windy in Chicago that she wasn't able to take her gels because her hands and lips were numb. The wind alone cost her significant time.

Dryer next ran the New York City Marathon a year later, but when Paula Radcliffe and Gete Wami took off from the gun and broke the woman's field apart early in the race, Dryer was left to run almost the whole distance on her own. She didn't race poorly—she finished 6th in 2:35:15 and was the first American—but neither did she race well, and 2:35 was much slower than she had hoped to run. Her next marathon was be the Olympic trials the following spring, and for that Dryer simply overtrained.

It's a mistake she hopes to avoid this spring, and her cycle this time around has reflected something of a shift: while the philosophy isn't vastly different than it was for her first three marathon build ups, she has reduced her peak mileage from the 120-130 range down to 90 or 100. "The marathon has been the easiest race for me to over prepare for," Dryer told me. "You're almost better off being 10 percent undertrained than 1 percent over trained." She believes that if she can get the mix right in Boston she may be able to fulfill the potential that Chicago in 2006 seemed to indicate, and that her track PRs (15:03 for 5,000m, 31:21 for 10,000m) also suggest.

It's probably not possible to answer questions about why fulfilling that marathon potential is so important to Dryer, at least not with any depth, because why she runs is on some level no less an existential problem than any other problems we have with the nature of human activity. But it's worth noting that her answer is essentially more inward-focused than that of many professional athletes. Certainly she's not looking for money or fame, so there must be some notion of personal excellence at stake, and personal excellence is a difficult concept to articulate. Or it's difficult to articulate, but it's easy to identify: right now, personal excellence means running the Boston Marathon.

Actions, Not Words

One of the other interesting things about Elva Dryer is that while she keeps a low profile, the people who know her love her and won't stop talking about her. It's a theme that has followed Dryer for years, and I suspect that for those who are close to her it's somewhat frustrating. She is immensely talented and almost as fully accomplished as any American distance woman can hope to be, and possesses a winning personality, if such a thing can be said, but she is perpetually overlooked. On the other hand, it doesn't seem like Dryer cares a whit.

Dryer was initially reluctant to speak with Running Times for this article. Following her Olympic trials 10,000m last summer and her disappointing performances throughout the rest of 2008, she made it clear that she felt she needed to let her "feet do the talking," which is as good an indication of Dryer's attitude towards running as anything else.

When we last spoke, I wondered if she was possibly embarrassed to be running late into her 30s, when she is likely beyond her peak as an athlete and when she hasn't raced at a high level in over a year. Dryer didn't think the word “embarrassed” was quite right, and after thinking about it she emailed me to say that the feeling was closer to a sense of being undeserving. "I feel like things have gone a little backwards for me," she wrote. "I've had more media attention in the most recent years when I've had some of my worst performances than earlier in my career when I was running much better...Perhaps it's a little bit of an inferiority complex."

In any case, undeserving or not (and it's rather difficult to conceive of Dryer as an undeserving person), she isn’t running for the attention, and the limited amount she has received probably won't strike anybody as excessive, so it's a point with marginal relevance. As Dryer has said, this is a personal marathon. There is a possibility that a fast run might lead to selection for the world championships marathon team in Berlin this summer, although the selection criteria are unclear and Boston times might not count because the course is a net downhill. But even that is beside the point.

"The one thing that I couldn't not do was give myself another chance at the marathon," Dryer told me the first time we spoke. "I just couldn't walk away from the sport feeling like I could do better, and if I don't do better, okay, at least I tried. At least I gave myself another chance."